The quest for truth

Bernard Williams, an Essex boy who read classics at Oxford, became enthralled by philosophy. His academic career was interrupted by national service as a Spitfire pilot but he returned to teaching and pioneered the study of personal identity. His new book reflects a lifelong challenge to philosophical fashions. By Stuart Jeffries

It's a Wednesday evening in the Holywell Music Room in Oxford. For an hour the philosopher Bernard Williams has been talking about his new book Truth and Truthfulness before a contemplative audience. He's distinguished between Herodotus and Thucydides, saying that only with the latter did history emerge from storytelling to become a truth-telling activity. He's cited Voltaire's contention that men use language to conceal their thoughts. He's discussed the scene in Orwell's 1984 in which the Party boss O'Brien makes Winston Smith believe that 2+2=5 is true by threatening him with rats.

Then, from the audience, a man puts up his hand. "Hello Bernard, you taught me at New College in the early 1950s. I was just wondering whether what you're doing now would have been regarded as philosophy in Oxford half a century ago and whether the book has anything to offer the man in the street." Williams smiles, wraps his foot tighter around his calf and says: "I couldn't have written this book in the 50s. I didn't have the breadth of learning." Miles Burnyeat, the philosopher who is sharing the stage with Williams, says: "It wouldn't have been called philosophy." Williams nods: "Philosophy is altogether less pure now. It's been impurified by science and social science and history. I think it's in a much better shape than it was in the 50s. As for the man in the street, I can't pretend it's an easy read. Alain de Botton it isn't."

The aim of the new book, he says, is to explore a profound paradox: there is today a great commitment to truthfulness in public life, in historical understanding, in social and natural sciences, and this has produced a pervasive intellectual suspicion; but this suspicion has been turned against the notion of truth itself and this, Williams believes, has brought about a cri sis for the humanities. All kinds of intellectuals, usually branded post-modernists, now believe that the quest for truth need not be at the heart of their enterprises. They include Derrida and his acolytes, those swayed by Foucault, historians such as Paige Dubois, who contend that truth is historically bound up with Greek slavery and so its pursuit does nobody any good. Williams calls these people deniers of the values of truth.

The chief denier, though, and the book's primary target, is his former colleague Richard Rorty, the American philosopher, who argues that truth is not only dispensable, but that its pursuit by scientists and historians is a hopeless surrogate for humanity's earlier worship of God. Rorty agrees with Nietzsche that now God is dead, intellectuals replace him with metaphysical fictions like truth. "We would be stronger, freer, better human beings," Rorty wrote recently, "if we could bring ourselves to dispense with all such surrogates." We should stop seeking the truth, he argued; we would do better to focus on reaching pragmatic agreement. For Williams, truth and truthfulness are indispensable to us and he tries to show in his book that in any human society truth will be valued, and his twin virtues of truth - sincerity and accuracy - prized.

"Why," Williams asks his Oxford audience, "is it better to believe with Mrs Harrison [a woman he has invented for the evening] that Africa is a continent that has the equator running through it than with O'Brien that 2+2=5? It can't be because Mrs Harrison is nice and O'Brien has tortured you with rats. It's because Mrs Harrison's belief is linked with the truth." Rorty argued that the point of Orwell's story is not that 2+2=4 is true, but that the freedom to say it is what matters. According to Rorty, it would have been just as bad if O'Brien had made Smith believe something was true by means of torture.

Reviewers of Truth and Truthfulness , published last month, have been enthusiastic and none has yet dissented from the book jacket blurb that says Williams is Britain's greatest living philosopher. Even Rorty, at the end of a long critique for the London Review of Books, writes: "That is no hyperbole. Since the death of Isaiah Berlin - with whose work Williams's has many continuities - no philosophy professor in that part of the world has been more deeply, or more deservedly, admired by his peers."

Bernard Williams is used to being admired. When he was a Fellow at Oxford in the 1950s, at All Souls and New College, philosophers such as Stuart Hampshire, Gilbert Ryle and above all AJ Ayer were bowled over by his intelligence. "He was tremendously quick, rapid in his reactions and that served him well in the Oxford philosophy of that time," says Shirley Williams née Catlin, his former wife and now the Liberal Democrats' leader in the House of Lords. "The tone was to a large extent set by Freddie [Ayer] because Freddie had a quicksilver mind and Bernard had a quicksilver mind too. Freddie thought of Bernard as a virtual son, admired him and saw him as his natural successor, which he wasn't really. He was much more interested in moral philosophy, but got caught up in the prevailing linguistic questions. I think ultimately he saw that the culture was clever but shallow. But at the start he was rather dazzled by it, and by the fact that they saw him as incredibly bright."

Ryle was especially dazzled, once saying of Williams, "He understands what you're going to say better than you understand it yourself, and sees all the possible objections to it, all the possible answers to all the possible objections, be fore you've got to the end of your sentence." Williams believes he developed his philosophical skills while studying classical texts at school. " We did a lot of grammatical analysis of ancient texts and that must have appealed to my taste. I was interested in philosophy before I knew I was. That's to say when I was at school I used to argue with my friends about issues that turned out to be philosophical ones of some kind. I remember some were about art and morality, aesthetic value and moral value, the social purposes of art. We had quite a lot of arguments because I was quite leftwing, and we had political controversies too, with the election of 1945. We used to argue about the Soviet Union and Bolshevism."

Williams is an Essex boy. "I was born in Southend-on-Sea, whose proudest boast was that it had the longest pier in the Empire." His mother, Hilda, was a personal assistant; his father, Owen, an architect and surveyor who was awarded the OBE for his last job, as chief maintenance surveyor for the ministry of works. Williams studied at Chigwell School. " It should have been a direct grant grammar school, but it had a boarding element so that in 1944 when the Education Act came in, the then headmaster - a very unintellectual man whom I very much disliked - made a characteristically wrong decision and turned it into a very minor public school."

But it was his headmaster who unwittingly pushed Williams towards the study of philosophy: "Virtually the only subject in which one could ever get a scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge was classics. So I went to Oxford to study classics and, unlike Cambridge, it had a philosophy component and I became completely transported by it. "

The late 40s and early 50s were exciting times to start a lifelong affair with philosophy. At Oxford, the subject was in an intellectual ferment - Ayer's logical positivism had been refuted but its lack of deference to the age-old problems of philosophy was still current. Samizdat copies of the texts that made up Wittgenstein's later philosophy were being circulated. JL Austin's linguistic philosophy commanded loyal followers and Gilbert Ryle's revolutionary anti-Cartesian book The Concept of Mind was being avidly discussed. Williams's interests in the historical side of his degree suffered because of his obsession with philosophy, but he still graduated with congratulatory honours.

Williams was initially thrilled by the promise of Oxford analytic philosophy. "When you had taken the problems of philosophy apart, you'd find that many of its traditional questions had not been solved but had disappeared," he has said. "The promise this offered was very exciting. There really were people saying that the whole of philosophy would be over in 50 years."

But the ahistorical temper of Oxford philosophy and the premium it put on cleverness began to pall. "I have to say that I am quick," says Williams. "I did come to recognise that I needed not to be quick, that cleverness was not enough." His mentor was Ryle. Williams says: "What I particularly liked was his enormous dislike of isms and schools. I was very influenced by that."

Shortly after graduating in 1951, Williams was called up and sent to Canada to train as an RAF pilot. He spent a year flying Spitfires, and was reportedly very skilled at it. At the time, Shirley Brittain was studying at Columbia University in New York. "We had known each other as students, and Bernard had helped me with philosophy, which I was enormously irritated by," she says. "But then we were just mutually admiring friends." Then Bernard met Shirley while on leave in New York. "I remember we went to see the first run of Guys and Dolls ," she recalls. The two then visited New England, staying in a house in Connecticut belonging to an old lady who had been Bartók's major patron and had rescued the composer from poverty in New York just after the war. "I remember she was very pleased with Bernard, who knew a lot about music. We had this magical week. He was frightfully good looking at the time in this matinée-idol way and, of course, the RAF uniform added to the effect. She kept saying to me, 'This is the most wonderful man, you have to marry him.'"

First, though, Shirley had a fling with the four-minute-miler Roger Bannister. "We then got back together after our respective aberrations, and we did get married in 1955." The young couple lived and worked in London - Bernard became a lecturer at University College and later professor of philosophy at the now-defunct Bedford College, and Shirley worked as a journalist for the Financial Times. They lived for 17 years in a large house in Kensington with the literary agent Hilary Rubinstein and his wife. During that time the Williams's daughter Rebecca, now a lawyer, was born. "It was enormous fun, it was one of the happiest periods of my life," says Bernard.

Williams abandoned the hope that philosophers could quickly make themselves redundant, and specialised in areas that Oxford linguistic philosophy neglected. In 1962 he wrote an influential paper, The Idea of Equality, in which the lifelong Labour Party member argued for an egalitarian wealth distribution on the grounds that other policies were irrational. He also pioneered the now-fashionable philosophical study of personal identity, bringing a young man's fresh perspective to traditional problems.

His first book, Morality , was published in 1971, and was an incendiary critique of British philosophy's obsession with meta-ethical questions (What is the nature of moral judgment? Can there be moral knowledge?) at the expense of first-order ethical questions concerning abortion, famine and feminism. "I rejected the way in which morality was discussed - as though it was an abstract thing. It was so boring and pointless! The book also showed me as I wrote it that I hated util itarianism [the English moral philosophy that regards the right action as the one that has the best consequences for human well-being]. I used to have very pious utilitarian views. But I came to see that consequentialist reasoning could just lead you on and on in the wrong direction."

Towards the end of Morality Williams approvingly quotes DH Lawrence: "Find your deepest impulse, and follow that." He adds this gloss: "The combination - discovery, trust, and risk - are central to this sort of outlook, as of course they are to the state of being in love." Only a few years after this book was published Williams discovered he was in love with someone other than his wife. "If there's one theme in all my work it's about authenticity and self-expression," he says. "It's the idea that some things are in some real sense really you, or express what you and others aren't. [Lawrence] is an author I always found difficult but he sure made an impression on me with that remark. It went with my interest as a schoolboy in the aesthetic versus the moral, and the artist as antinomian figure."

Williams had fallen in love with Patricia Skinner, then Cambridge University Press's philosophy editor and wife of Cambridge history professor Quentin Skinner. She had asked Williams to write a critical essay about utilitarianism to be paired with an essay by JJC Smart for a book entitled Utilitarianism For and Against , still a textbook for philosophy undergraduates. Shirley Williams recalls: "He just fell in love, and I have to admit, looking back, she was probably better for him than I was. He needed an intelligent, attractive but supportive wife and he didn't get that from me - well, maybe the first.

"Ours was a very alive marriage, but there was something of a strain that comes from two things. One is that we were both too caught up in what we were respectively doing - we didn't spend all that much time together; the other, to be completely honest, is that I'm fairly unjudgmental and I found Bernard's capacity for pretty sharp putting-down of people he thought were stupid unacceptable. Patricia has been cleverer than me in that respect. She just rides it. He can be very painful sometimes. He can eviscerate somebody. Those who are left behind are, as it were, dead personalities. Judge not that ye be not judged. I was influenced by Christian thinking, and he would say 'That's frightfully pompous and it's not really the point'. So we had a certain jarring over that and over Catholicism. I've long ceased to be bitter about it."

Williams concedes: "Sometimes I can be extremely tough. I like to think that this is usually when I'm confronted with self-satisfaction. In philosophy the thing that irritates me is smugness, particularly scientistic smugness. What makes me really angry these days are certain kinds of reductive scientism that knock all the philosophical difficulties out." He then proceeds to say some very disparaging things about the evolutionary biologist Steven Pinker. "I heard him talk recently. He's a very smooth performer, very clever, but utterly glib. He just rides roughshod over the real philosophical problems."

After the divorce in 1974, Bernard married Patricia, but Shirley Williams had to wait for the Catholic church to annul the marriage before she could remarry. During the wait, Bernard discussed philosophical issues to do with the annulment with Catholic theologians. The issue turned on his intentions when he and Shirley got married. While Shirley was (and is) a devout Catholic and so took the marriage as a commitment for eternity, Bernard, an atheist, had not done so when he made the wedding vows. Shirley says: "The Church and Bernard had a wonderful time debating all this. The theologians were so thrilled to be discussing it with a leading philosopher."

Williams enjoyed serving on a series of government committees. He says: "I did all the major vices - gambling, drugs, pornography and public schools." It was his chairmanship of the Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship in 1976 that proved most influential. His 1979 report used John Stuart Mill's principle of liberty to develop a permissive so-called "harm condition" whereby "no conduct should be suppressed by law unless it can be shown to harm someone", and found that the link between sex crimes and pornography was unproven. What lingers, though, is his memory of Mary White house giving evidence before the committee: "She turned up with a bundle of sexually explicit books that she claimed were given to eight-year-old schoolchildren in Denmark. Now, my Danish is not exactly cutting edge, but when I looked at them even I was able to read 'This book is not to be used for children under the age of 16.' The woman was a complete crook."

By the late 1970s, Williams, by then professor of philosophy at Cambridge, was sick of teaching. He became provost of King's College, Cambridge. "I had done an awful lot of teaching, from 1953 to 1979, and I wanted to say ' basta ' already. It was self-exploration, to see if I was good at doing practical things. And it also made me freer as a philosophical writer. I didn't want to be popular, but the decision meant I could write with a freer spirit." During his time as provost his two sons by Patricia, Jacob (who now works in the music business) and Jonathan (now a Cambridge undergraduate) were born. "I have so many happy memories of that time. It worked for me psychologically."

It was also a productive period intellectually, giving him the space to read more broadly, renewing his interest in ancient philosophy and literature, deepening his appreciation of continental philosophers such as Nietzsche, Diderot, Rousseau and Kierkegaard. The result was a philosopher with a deeper historical and literary sensibility than most of his British colleagues. This freer spirit was first manifest in a book called Moral Luck , whose title essay argued that one's being blameable for an action, for example abandoning one's family and going off to Tahiti to paint, could depend on luck - such as turning out to be a great artist like Gauguin. This thesis, upsetting to the two prevailing isms of British moral philosophy, utilitarianism and Kantianism [which claims that the right moral action is always rational and freely chosen], did not appeal to all reviewers. Ted Honderich, one of Williams's colleagues at London and later Grote Professor at University College London, wrote that luck was not part of morality, and in a review charged Williams with being "too clever by only an eighth".

As in his most sustained attack on conventional moral philosophy theories, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985), Williams was revolting once more against over-tidy isms. "I was rejecting the notion of morality as rational control. The idea that life couldn't be luck-proof led me to think about tragedy and the ways in which the ancient world had better ways of thinking about this: how we're to understand luck and necessity, how these relate to the moral." The result was a series of lectures during the 1980s that resulted in the 1993 book Shame and Necessity . "This work on ancient texts was born of my conviction that we still had a lot to learn ethically from the Greeks. Few people were thinking in that direction." Williams left Britain in 1988 to go to California to become professor at Berkeley, making the headlines for being part of the anti-Thatcherite brain drain.

"I now regret my departure was so public. I was persuaded that there was a real problem about academic conditions and that if my departure was publicised this would bring these matters to public attention. It did a bit, but it made me seem narky, and when I came back again in three years it looked rather absurd. I came back for personal reasons - it's harder to live out there with a family than I supposed."

He returned to Britain to become White's professor of philosophy at Oxford. In 1996, he retired. "They very kindly decided to make me a Fellow of All Souls again." Now he's back at the elite college where he first became a prize Fellow half a century ago.

In his little study beneath Hawksmoor's twin towers, where he has one of the most beautiful urban views in Britain over the college cloisters and the Radcliffe Camera beyond, Williams muses on his career. "The whole thing has been about spelling out the notion of inner necessity. That someone who has to do something, has to live in a certain way or discovers something is really him, what he belongs to, what is his destiny - I'm drawn to all that. I do regard myself as very lucky because I was able to spend my life in a subject which I enormously enjoyed." These days, though, the workload is lighter. "I have no duties whatever. It suits me. I've had a bout of ill health since 1999. It's cancer. It's one of those diseases that doesn't go away. You can do a certain amount to mitigate its hold, as it were."

Williams is not so ill that he has given up writing projects. He's planning to publish some of his occasional pieces on opera, and is considering writing a book about his encounters with politicians. That's just a glint in the eye right now. Has he considered a truth-telling or at least storytelling autobiography? "I take the idea of writing an autobiography immensely seriously. Bill Buford got me to write something about my schooldays and he explained why this wasn't going to be a success as writing. I learned a lot from that - mostly negative. I think my virtues, certainly as a writer, are manifest in a different way."